[Lunaugh]

Greetings code crunching fanatics and lurkers alike,
I'm inspired by Master Merchant and Tamriel Trade Centre, but I find that in exploring their code, it is not as simple as cannibalizing functions to build my own (currently private) add-on.

I've come to the conclusion that I should start fresh, though I've taken as many lessons as I could from the above add-ons raw lua.

I want to use the following functions, but I don't know what conditions (if any) are required for the function to... function:
GetNumTradingHouseGuilds()
GetTradingHouseGuildDetails()
GetNumGuilds()
GetGuildID()
GetGuildName()
SelectTradingHouseGuildid ()
RequestTradingHouseListings()
GetNumTradingHouseListings()
GetTradingHouseListingItemInfo()

If someone would be so kind as to help me understand the pre-reqs I'd be very appreciative;
currently I'm writing the code without using events; I plan on using /'addonName' 'function' 'var1' 'var2' to activate my various functions in game.

A little background: I'm self taught in Python and Lua, my first attempt to write an add on was to write it in Python, then make my .py file required by lua so I didn't have to learn lua.......... in the process I wound up learning enough about lua to realize that I'd be re-building the entire api (blindly) to make one add-on that may or may not function AND needs a lua file interpreter.
When I am confident in my abilities, I plan on making add-ons for public consumption.

Tl;dr
Please help!